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Nanashi comments on Learning takes a long time - Less Wrong
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I think that's because, when looking at the aggregate of society, it's more efficient to bring people up to the level of semi-proficiency than it is to bring them to the level of expertise. If you have 100,000 hours of training to allocate, you get more bang for your buck to train 50 people to 80% proficiency than it is to train 10 people to the level of an expert.
The flaw, of course, is that "training hours" isn't a finite, discrete resource. Any individual can opt to spend additional time of their own accord if they are truly passionate. The problem is, at the points in our lives when we have the most free time to spend improving ourselves (read: high school), we also have the least idea of what the hell we want to do with it.
I don't think it's only a matter of training time. Having to learn for an exam requires you to learn the concepts in a few weeks instead of spending two years on it. Quite often people forget things after they wrote the exam.
Distributing the learning over a longer time frame allows for deeper integration.
Only when they've got some minimal level of guidance, such as our Best Textbooks thread and a dependency graph of subjects.